Field of the Invention
The present technology relates generally to costs associated with natural language translation. More specifically, the present technology relates to predicting the cost associated with translating textual content.
Related Art
Machine translation of natural languages is presently an imperfect technology and will likely produce imperfect results in the next several decades. For certain bodies of text, a machine translation system may produce outputs of very high quality, which can be published directly to satisfy a given goal. For example, if automatic translation quality is compelling, some customer support documents translated to a target language could be published on the web in order to enable customers who speak the target language to access information that may not be otherwise available. As such, this may lead to a smaller number of customers making support calls, thus reducing overhead costs. For other documents, in contrast, possibly such as marketing materials, automatic translation quality may be too low to warrant their publication. In such cases, human translators may be necessary to translate these other documents.
A significant barrier to adopting machine translation technology is explained by potential customers not being able to know in advance the extent an existing machine translation system will be able to satisfy their needs. For example, current and projected costs of translating text may be difficult or impossible to accurately determine. Therefore, what is needed is a technology to gauge current and future costs associated with translating textual content.